The Trump-Kim rapprochement

June 12, will remain symbolic in the annals of world history! It was the day leaders of two adversarial nuclear-armed states, US president Donald J. Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jung-Un, sat down for a bilateral summit in Singapore to discuss peace in the Korean peninsula. Up until early this year, the relationship of the two leaders had been markedly acrimonious, with frequent exchange of vitriolic verbal attacks and open threats of mutual nuclear annihilation. Trump had threatened at the UN General Assembly last year to wipe out North Korea with nuclear weapons. Mercifully for us all, both leaders have now pulled back from the brink of a nuclear showdown which until a few months ago was a distinct possibility.

In its aftermath of that historic summit, Donald Trump has declared that North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat to the United States. What a relief! To be quite frank, North Korea had not at any time posed a nuclear threat to the US. If anything, it was the US that has all along been the greatest nuclear and military threat to the rest of the world, and most recently to North Korea! North Korea’s nuclear ambition is to satisfy its need for national security and protection, not to attack America or trigger a nuclear holocaust, as the usual hawks in Washington would like us to believe. It was the US president that openly threatened a nuclear Armageddon! But then, it is understandable, for America has never been averse to initiating pretexts for fighting foreign wars.

All perceptive students of US foreign policy know that the most important preoccupation of US foreign engagements since the end of the Second World War is its sickening national obsession for initiating and fighting wars abroad. They do this, according late Ali Mazrui, on the pretext that Americans would be safer at home by fighting wars abroad. Since the US emerged on the world stage as one of the two military superpowers at the end of the Second World War in 1945, fighting wars abroad has been a major preoccupation of all US administrations without exception. Every president since then has had to look for excuses to make war, more so since American politics, its national security and foreign policy have been hijacked by and put under the vise grip of what President Eisenhower famously termed the ‘military-industrial complex’, that unholy alliance of the military hierarchs and the big arms manufacturers working to control the government. Goaded on behind the scenes by this evil behemoth, i.e., the alliance of the huge military establishment having millions of men strategically deployed on hundreds of bases across the globe and the multi-trillion dollar arms manufacturing combines, every US president has had to look for one pretext or the other to fight a foreign war on which billions of dollars worth of munitions would be expended to make the arms manufacturers smile to their banks. After President Eisenhower who gave that ominous warning that Americans must prevent this pernicious combined evil from totally hijacking the government of the people from the people, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson started and escalated their Vietnam war, a savage war that that Richard Nixon and Gerard Ford inherited and pursued with much greater brutality and massive destruction; Jimmy Carter had a disastrous attempt to use military force to rescue kidnapped American diplomats held hostage in Iran; Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada and bombed Libya in a failed attempt to kill Muammar Gaddafi; George H. W. Bush invaded Panama, and later Iraq ostensibly to liberate Kuwait from its grips; Bill Clinton bombed Sudan ostensibly to punish Osama Bin Laden and avenge Al Qaeda’s bombing of US embassies in East Africa; and George W. Bush (the junior) sexed up intelligence to create the most egregious pretext for bombing Afghanistan, and later for invading and destroying Iraq on the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction targeted at the US. Even Barack Obama, who was gifted the Nobel Peace Prize at the start of his administration, ended up a great war-monger just like the rest of them. In Africa, he spearheaded and coordinated NATO’s bombing and destruction of Libya to satiate America’s predilection for regime change. Libya is today in ruins and a failed state courtesy of Barack Obama. Most of Middle East and Afghanistan is a smoldering inferno today, as it has been for decades now, all thanks to the war-mongering leaders of the United States of America.

It was clear to those familiar with US foreign policy that months before this historic summit, Donald Trump had been ramping up excuses for a major foreign war: it was either going to be with North Korea or Iran. This summit appears to have pulled both North Korea and US back, at least for the meantime, from the edge of what could be a nuclear Armageddon since both are well armed with dangerous nuclear weapons and long-range missile delivery systems. Even if America possesses many more nuclear missiles than NK, as it actually does, the reality is that a nuclear weapon is a weapon of mass destruction whose use only a totally depraved or satanic mind would authorize. For me, I have never thought of Donald Trump as totally sane person anyway. And I am not alone in that regard. In October last year, a group of 27 American psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health professionals in a series of articles published into a book titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” actually questioned his metal fitness. In the book, which became an instant best seller, they contend that his “pathological narcissism and sociopathy” could lead America into a war. To be candid, I wholeheartedly subscribe to Professor Biodun Jeyifo’s characterization of Trump as an “innately evil” person who is “completely devoid of normal human decency and moral and psychological self-restraint” (The Nation, Sunday April 22, p. 21). Only a satanic person is capable of threatening to rain down “fire and fury” and total destruction of North Korea with weapons of mass destruction that would incinerate millions of non-combatants at the flick of a nuclear button; only a thoroughly depraved mind would boast that his nuclear button is bigger than his adversary’s!

The grounds for a foreign war had been carefully prepared and he had purposefully assembled a team of war-mongering technocrats to egg him on – the hawkish John Bolton as National Security Adviser, Mike Pompeo, formerly CIA Director as new Secretary of State, Nikki Haley as the UN ambassador who often seems more hawkish than Trump himself, and of course, the ever ubiquitous military-industrial complex waiting in the wings. And with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu pulling the strings and beating the war drums, Trump was being goaded into a war in the Middle East, a war against Iran. And this seemed a distinct possibility as he was failing to make significant political success at home and abroad, and his fragile ego might lead him to seek for compensation elsewhere.

Mercifully for humanity, this unstable Donald Trump may never have the opportunity to use his bigger nuclear buttons against North Korea or any other country for that matter. How he navigates the labyrinthine politics of his hawkish apparatchiks, military hierarchs and war-baiting military-industrial complex is what the rest of the world must watch carefully.